Leading the co-founders is Nathaniel Ru, perhaps the most vocal of the bunch, and it has been his work that has caught the eyes and ears of industry players around the world.

Nathaniel Ru has helped to lead Sweetgreen into the future as one of the most promising young start ups around and the way that they are doing it is going to lead to more companies looking to emulate them.

Sweetgreen, at its core, is all about giving customers good food at a great price — while also maintaining a healthy outlook on their meals. Sweetgreen offers only high end salads and those salads are created with locally sourced ingredients that leave customers full and not needing to get another meal 45 minutes later.

Nathaniel Ru knows that Sweetgreen likely couldn’t have succeeded at any other point in time. A fortuitous meeting led them to scoring a great location at a rock bottom price and that led to a slew of investors coming on board to help the company out at inception. Now, nearly a decade later, Sweetgreen has spread to 40 different locations throughout the United States.

The trio of co-founders are also split up, living in both the East and West coast, and they are focused on bringing Sweetgreen to both sides of the country. The goal is simple, Nathaniel Ru and his team want to make Sweetgreen a national brand without sacrificing any of their quality or control.

That is what has led marketing execs like Theresa Dold to focus on emulating more of the Apple experience. Sweetgreen hosts community events and they also make sure to have a wide ranging web presence. In fact, this web presence brings in nearly 30% of Sweetgreen’s sales during the year.